With ShipWorks being bought by Stamps.com (along with other shipping software services), and not being a fan of Stamps.com, I thought I'd try out another shipping service that works with Endicia's label server. Shipping Easy is one of Endicia's recommended partner and is pushed heavily on their website. I signed up for a free trial and scheduled a demo. They do have some nice features and the software appears to work well. Some nice stuff:

1. Free Endicia account included. - this is appealing because I currently pay $34.99 for my Endicia Pro account that integrates with my mail consolidator (Globegistics - great service, checkout the review here on Webretailer.com).

3. Can set up a lot of different options and defaults. Very easy to administer.

4. Scheduled training. Very thorough training and feature review. I was also handed off to another "expert" to assist with setting up the printer and then handed back to complete training, with minimal hold or disruption. After dealing with Shipworks "service" this was amazing. Having a scheduled time to work with them makes all the difference.

5. Reporting is decent and can be scheduled.

6. Flexible design options.

The bad:

1. You cannot print your invoices ahead of shipping. You must create postage first. You can print packing slips prior to shipping, which can be modified to an extent, but you can only print them on 8.5x11 sheet - no thermal labels (at least you cannot make them look good on thermal labels). This is huge if you include them in your orders - laster cartridges and paper are expensive.

2. You cannot edit an order to add items within their system. For instance, I entered a manual order and found out the customer wanted to add an item. No can do, you have to start all over.

3. Printing of individual packages is somewhat slow. I think this is a flaw of all shipping software providers that are cloud based. It is just not as efficient as a local based software.

4. They make you enter package size on 1st class - it is not necessary. Minor but annoying none the less. You can speed this up by setting a default though.

For me the big headache is the lack of support for printing packing slips and/or receipts on a thermal printer prior to postage. If you ship a myriad of orders with different items and weights, it just doesn't work to batch print. Being forced to batch print just results in a myriad of mistakes from wrong items being packed to incorrect weights. I had to actually ban employees (when I had them) to not batch print due to the accumulation of mistakes.

I could only recommend Shipping Easy if you are not using a thermal printer or are ok with using a laser/ink jet for your invoices (on 8.5x11 paper). It also works really well if you are shipping lots of the same items over and over again. Small volume (less than 30 daily shipments) might be ok too. It jsut doesn't work for my needs.

The system itself I would rate as 2 stars, as it is not designed for pro level sellers. It is almost as if the designers didn't really test it and have been modifying it slowly ever since.

I will say their staff is first class. They truly listen and do want to help, but that is not enough to overcome the issues. This is why they got the 3rd star. The 3rd star is also deserved for the overall affordability. While it didn't fit our business model, this system could serve some folks well. I expect that in another 2 years, they will be a really first class system.